The Austrians are here on their second try, following the first Lamentations Of The Chaos Omega. In this latest work we find two pieces of over twenty minutes of varied content. The black assault is the typical 1990s one, with modern and innovative moments, but that is the shot. The strength of The Negative Bias is to always mutate the musical flow, one is plunged into a black universe without leaving time for the listener to get used to it, one is turned upside down, the perspective is constantly changing. At some point the vortex, the English word void is more appropriate, grabs you and conquers you, and it is beautiful to be carried around by this black metal that is never the same. To be able to pull off something like this you have to have musical and particularly compositional talent out of the ordinary, and we find plenty of that here. There are never any obvious passages, fillers or moments of weariness, the journey into darkness knows no rest, everything changes and we are no longer at the center, we are spectators of something immensely bigger than ourselves that we can neither see nor understand but that The Negative Bias put beautifully into music. Even the slower moments have meaning, they are not calm parentheses but it is breathlessness. An album that takes the discourse begun by the first work much further and puts the Austrian band in the spotlight of those who love the truest, most visceral and even innovative black metal. The record is released by Trieste-based ATMF, one of the guiding labels for those who love black metal that rarely makes a wrong record, but more importantly is developing its own particular poetics that leads it to release albums of deadly beauty that directly touch our hearts. (M.Argo – MetalEyes 17/7/2019)

2019 – Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum